Saratoga News

Columns

Stereopticon

Recalling a time when giants ruled the area skies

By Willys Peck

It must have something to do with one's twilight years, this business of having a word or circumstance trigger an outflow of memories going back to early childhood. This occurred to me most recently with a newspaper story concerning the remains of the dirigible USS Macon found at the bottom of the ocean off Point Sur.

I know this column is supposed to focus on Saratoga, but 70-odd years ago the Macon was a Saratoga presence as it passed overhead on the way to its base at Moffett Field. Since the base was only a little over 10 air miles from Saratoga, the ship was low enough on its arrivals and departures for people here to get a good look at it when it passed in this direction.

For the benefit of you younger folk for whom the word "dirigible" doesn't ring any bells, a word of explanation is in order. A dirigible, from the Latin word dirigere, to direct, is a steerable balloon, one with a framework housing gas cells that give it buoyancy. There is crew and equipment space within this framework, and a control car suspended under the forward section. A blimp is a non-rigid airship, an elongated gasbag with control surfaces at the rear and a control car beneath.

Dirigibles, or zeppelins--named after the original builder, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin--first came into use as weapons by the Germans in World War I. After the war, dirigibles had considerable use as passenger carriers, ending with the Hindenburg disaster in 1937.

But, getting back to Sunnyvale and the local dirigible scene: Did I say Sunnyvale when, as is well known, Moffett Field is in Mountain View? It's another quaint bit of folklore. The story I heard was that "mountain" was not a word that dirigible people wanted to use, since mountains suggest an invitation to aircraft disaster. So until it became Moffett Field, named for Rear Adm. William A. Moffett, who died in the crash of the USS Akron, sister ship of the Macon, in 1933, the field was known locally as the Sunnyvale airbase.

Some Saratogans may have gotten their first look at a dirigible in 1929, when the Graf Zeppelin, Germany's most successful passenger-carrier, made a round-the-world tour. As a 5-year-old, I remember people talking about it, but I don't recall hearing of any sightings.

In Saratoga we did get a real dirigible look in 1932, when the USS Akron made a trip out West and was moored for a short time at the Sunnyvale airbase (OK, OK, the future Moffett Field). This was before the hangar was built, and it was quite a sight to see the huge craft at its mooring mast. To explain the adjective "huge": the Akron and Macon were 785 feet long--more than two football fields--and 132.9 feet at their maximum diameter. Powered by eight engines, they had a 60-man flight crew and carried five airplanes that could be launched and taken back aboard while the dirigible was in flight.

The Akron went back east, where it was destroyed in a storm off the New Jersey coast on April 14, 1933. In October of that year, the Macon came out here, and I remember how a group of us kids hiked up to a hilltop north of the Village, where we had what amounted to a grandstand seat as the dirigible nosed down to the mooring mast. The huge structure now known as Hangar One was ready and waiting.

A couple of things about that hangar. One is that we could see it from the lower end of the Saratoga Grammar School playground, and when the door was open, we could see the Macon's huge fins. Another thing is, that hangar was open to the public. After checking in at the airfield gate, John Q. Citizen could walk in and look at the huge craft that practically filled the hangar. Usually there was a small blimp off to one side, and one could look at one of the airplanes parked off to one side. One time in the summer of 1934 my dad wangled a deal where he, my brother and I were actually taken aboard the Macon. We saw the control car and the crew's quarters along the airship's keel, but visitors weren't allowed to see the airplane space and launching mechanism.

The final chapter of my Macon recollections concerns the predawn hours of Feb. 13, 1935, when our family was awakened by a newspaper seller driving down our street (Orchard Road) shouting "Extra!" It was the news of the Macon's demise.